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Why are the SW devs who are supposed to write new features also in charge of managing complaints from mods? Wouldn't the solution here be to dedicate engineers

Why are the SW devs who are supposed to write new features also in charge of managing complaints from mods? Wouldn't the solution here be to dedicate engineers to ship the features that are intended to decrease your support load? That's basic management 101: be an umbrella.

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
I think the role we're talking about is "Community manager" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager This shouldn't fall to Software Engineers to do, it's an entirely different and far more people-centric skillset. Maybe you would have engineers providing support to community managers for tools and ad-hoc fixes "intended to decrease the support load" as you say, but as second-line assistance, not doing the main body of work. You would think that if anyone has the specialisation that comes at scale and could do this, reddit does.
- ninkendo 10y ago
  Right, it seems very odd that he cited that as the #1 reason they couldn't ship new features to decrease their support load: because their support load was too high. Why are the same people doing both?
  - deadbunny 10y ago
    Because Reddit makes very little money so devs get to joy of moderation as well as development would be my guess. I'm sure that worked back when reddit was a much smaller tech orientated site, not the beast it is today.
moduspwnens14 10y ago
It might be just that Reddit is still fairly young and doesn't have a lot of employees. Maybe they want to add features like "showing number of unread comments since last visit" or "better ad management system." When you work at a small company, features like that can get sidelined for months to do something like "build algorithm for tying different users together as one entity to ensure bans aren't trivially worked around." With things like that happening, you can lose a lot of developer time on this kind of stuff without them even directly handling bans / policy decisions.
- foobarchu 10y ago
  But reddit is not young. Reddit is more than a decade old. According to wikipedia, it's the 11th most trafficked site in the US, and 25th in the world. They are well past the point of "our employees all do a bit of everything".

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago

I think the role we're talking about is "Community manager" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_manager This shouldn't fall to Software Engineers to do, it's an entirely different and far more people-centric skillset. Maybe you would have engineers providing support to community managers for tools and ad-hoc fixes "intended to decrease the support load" as you say, but as second-line assistance, not doing the main body of work. You would think that if anyone has the specialisation that comes at scale and could do this, reddit does.

ninkendo 10y ago
Right, it seems very odd that he cited that as the #1 reason they couldn't ship new features to decrease their support load: because their support load was too high. Why are the same people doing both?
- deadbunny 10y ago
  Because Reddit makes very little money so devs get to joy of moderation as well as development would be my guess. I'm sure that worked back when reddit was a much smaller tech orientated site, not the beast it is today.

moduspwnens14 10y ago

It might be just that Reddit is still fairly young and doesn't have a lot of employees. Maybe they want to add features like "showing number of unread comments since last visit" or "better ad management system." When you work at a small company, features like that can get sidelined for months to do something like "build algorithm for tying different users together as one entity to ensure bans aren't trivially worked around." With things like that happening, you can lose a lot of developer time on this kind of stuff without them even directly handling bans / policy decisions.

foobarchu 10y ago
But reddit is not young. Reddit is more than a decade old. According to wikipedia, it's the 11th most trafficked site in the US, and 25th in the world. They are well past the point of "our employees all do a bit of everything".